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Benchmarks Of The Latest Nouveau Gallium3D Driver

06-28-2010, 07:00 AM

Phoronix: Benchmarks Of The Latest Nouveau Gallium3D Driver

In recent weeks we have published a number of benchmarks showcasing the ATI Gallium3D driver that supports the R300-R500 graphics processors as this open-source driver has been maturing at such an exciting rate with impressive changes and measurable performance gains over a short period of time. This ATI Gallium3D driver in most instances is outperforming the classic Radeon Mesa driver that supports up through the ATI Radeon X1000 series graphics cards. However, how is the Nouveau driver maturing that supports NVIDIA's wide-range of GeForce graphics cards? In February we published some Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks, but now we have a fresh set of numbers from three different NVIDIA graphics cards and we also compare the Nouveau Gallium3D driver to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

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NVIDIA will soon face a slow death (Fusion/Sandy Bridge are coming) but they will not release any specs.

Pity them.

LOL,
They will die as IGP on x86 platform ONLY.
AFAIK, NVIDIA is the only fully functional GPU for Linux with proprietary drivers. I (and my guess many others) don't really care if it's open or proprietary. It does the job. Games, Video, other features.
What about mobile ?
If i had to guess who gonna die first, it is probably AMD.

It's funny how people get all excited and are so ready to defend the honor of a specific brand like they are the champion defending the honor of their lady.

Anyway, it's a pitty that the nouveau drivers are so way behind the official drivers. It would be interesting to see how the nouveau performance compares on those cards that aren't supported by the newer nvidia drivers, since these are probably the ones that would benefit the most from the open source drivers.

PS: I bet none of the nvidia fanatics reached this far, and immediately started furiously searching and typing an answer where they show me a 10 year old game running at 5FPS on an HD4870 Or if they didn't do that they will now!

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as if releasing specs would change anything at this point. When did AMD release specs, and how fast is their OSS 3d acceleration today?

While releasing specs might give them an advantage in a few years, nvidia has more pressing problems right now.

This is faulty reasoning. After AMD released open and free documents for their GPUs the FOSS developers decided to implement a driver using the old Mesa driver stack first, before starting to develop a Gallium 3D driver (which started months, if not years later). This was because at the time the docs were first released, Gallium simply wasn't ready yet for driver development, and now it is.

And as for the speed "issues" in Gallium3D : in case you've ever done any development for Unix or Linux: it is a widely accepted mantra to "first get it working, then get it working well, and finally get working fast".
Especially for a driver system (with complementing drivers of course) that are not production quality yet (and no, inclusion in Fedora doesn't count; inclusion in RHEL would), the Gallium3D drivers' current performance level is understandable and acceptable.

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I pity YOU as the one not being able to render a damn game on Linux. Or maybe you are satisfied as the ~5FPS speed on a HD4870 running 10 year old game? That's even more pathetic

The funny thing is that this is exactly what the Windows crowd was telling me 10 years ago.

And exactly what the Internet Explorer crowd was telling me 5 years ago.

And what MS Office crowd is still telling me today.

I didn't care then, and I don't care now. If the games are a bit slower, I can live with it. I don't use Linux to play Windows games, I use it because it is a free platform developed cooperatively for the most part, and without shoving DRM and proprietary stuff in my face.